Strava integration officially announced

[MatthewFitbit]

Strava and Fitbit are excited to officially announce their partnership, making it even easier for members to track all day activity and maximize workouts. You can now connect your Fitbit account with Strava, which means your workouts logged in Fitbit will automatically sync to Strava, and your Strava workouts will sync to Fitbit!

Read more about this integration:

Official Fitbit Blog announcement

Related help article

[e2rd]

I have Surge and sync connection works fine just one thing is bothering me that in case that you press pause and go for a walk (2km) to visit some places and then you start and continue your ride, Strava includes also this time and distance to your workout.

So Fitbit activity time shows 1:22:54 and data transfered to strava is 1:36:45.

The biggest problem is that this change also lowers your AVG speed performance from 26 to 23.5 km/h on your activity list. It is a big difference between moving time and elapsed time in relation to AVG speed on the bike. I think that distance and AVG speed data transfered to Strava must be the same.

[MK2015]

My strava data uploads to my Fitbit profile fine - but the data for strava doesn't show up in my Challenges. For example, the 9,000ish steps I ran this morning do not show up in the Weekend Warrior challenge, but are appearing on my Dashboard.

[iwatts]

I have recently tracked a bike ride using Strava, while wearing my Fitbit Charge. When I got back I had tracked 5000 steps while on my bike - surely this is not possible as I am cycling. It has correctly added the exercise from Strava as an activity but I do not know how the 5000+ steps have got there - this will not have come from Strava, so it must be the Charge that has logged them. Anyone got any help or suggestions. Is the anser to not wear the charge while cycling?

[zvjer]

It seems we all have the same double steps problem with Strava integration. When I record my running with Strava (or any other app that syncs to Strava, like miCoach) it shows up automagicaly on my Fitbit dashboard as running activity which seems perfect! But at the same time while I was running with Strava my Fitbit was also logging steps on it's own and these steps also count in my dashboard resulting in double steps at the time of running.

[iwatts]

I contacted Fitbit Support who of course have not got back to me. They said it was a Strava issue and I had to contact Strava. I did who replied within 1 day. They suggested going on a bike ride without Strava and see if the Fitbit counted steps - which it did. So this is nothing to do with strava integration but to do with Fitbit counting steps while I am cycling.

[zvjer]

I imagine that step counting while cycling might be a bit weird. I don't have a bike, I only do inline skating and running which both is OK to have the "steps" counted. So what the fitbit dashboard needs to do is add some sort of inteligence if it gets the step data from two sources for the same time for the same time period - it should at least decide which of these two steps data is less important and OK to be discarded, or it should combine the two steps data bor better accuracy - if that's possible.

[iwatts]

Interestingly that is exactly what Fitbit claims it does..... but it doesn't. Support didn't want to know - I might try them again later and point out that it is nothing to do with Strava as it happens when Strava isn't being used - Customer service does not seeem brilliant.

[tinkster]

I have a surge, and use that to record runs & hikes. I also use Strava on my S5 to record my runs.

My fitbit recording does not show up in strava - I'd be keen to correlate the run with the heartrate there.

My strava activity shows up in fitbit, but that actually REDUCES my steps. The other morning I ran 23Km, the surge recorded ~ 21k steps.  For the imported strava acitvity it gave me 18K steps, which is what took precendence in my dashboard until I deleted the strava activity.

[tinkster]

zvjer, I experience the opposite problem.

The "steps" I get from the recorded strava activity are typically lower than my surge's, and my dashboard only accepts the lower value.

[Dewdman42]

Strava integration needs a lot of work.  For one thing, I end up with many steps for the day, which itsn't that important since the sync'd activiy over rides the calories for that time period, but still....  I don't think strava is bringing in extra steps, but I could be wrong.  I think its just counting the steps for that time period.

But bigger problems...  sync is very much delayed.  And also if I update the data on strava it doesn't seem to sync changes over.  Its not really a true sync, its a copy.

But here is the worst part, when I do a mt bike ride on strava, let's say I'm out there 3 hours, but total ride time is 2 hours.  Strava calculates riding calories for 2 hours.  But when it syncs over to Fitbit, fit bit replaces that 3 hours period with the 2 hours of riding calories from strava.  But in that 3 hours, there was an hour of walking around and so forth which are not lost.

Also, I can see no evidence that my charge HR is sending HR over to Strava, but I don't have premium account, so I don't know, and I ahve no idea if HR is being taken into consideration for calories, probably not.  

Strava is horrible at calculating mt biking calories anyway, so basically this integration is kind of useless, except that at least it creates an activity in fitbit that has the correct miles shown, even though it really has no direct bearing on fitbit calorie calculation anyway.  Basically, I think this integration is fairly pointless.

[iwatts]

Some of the problems aren't to do with Strava integration at all. Try doing a bike ride without Strava. Your Fitbit itself will add loads of steps while your biking. If you then do it with Strava it syncs the exercise as well but keeps the extra steps. Totally inaccurate but the only solution I have found is to take the Fitbit off while I'm cycling and hope the sync eventually works. If not I have to add it manually.

[Dewdman42]

Taking Fitbit off is not a solution either because the whole point of wearing mine is to have HR data correlated with biking data, which would be way better if they also imported altitude gains according to strava and speeds, even better would be to show the map so you could see where on the map your HR went up a lot or whatever.

But even if you take off the Fitbit, and rely on strava, as I said strava only calculates the actual my biking calories used. If you're anything like me, the ride is longer total time with less running time. Strava gets the calories value from the actual riding time. But with Fitbit we are trying to track all the calories through the day, including sitting around and waking to the bathroom. Let's take an example of 3 hour bike ride that had two hours of riding. Strava brings the two hours of riding calories into Fitbit and Fitbit replaces 3 hours of its own steps based calories with this 2 hour riding calories. So one hour of non riding calorie burn during that period is lost.

Using Fitbit without strava for cycling is very inaccurate, my mt bike ride records around 5000 steps and hundreds of stair floors, and ends up calculating very high calorie burn of like 2000 calories, and irrelevant miles. I have found that if I change the activity type to 10mph biking it seems to get closer to calculating calories based on the phantom steps and floors to something that sounds about right. So I will probably do that from now on as the strava integration is fubar and the only nice thing about it is that it imports the correct miles from strava. But I can manually edit the workout in Fitbit, when I set the activity type to 10mph biking I can enter the miles too it would seem.

[iwatts]

If I tend to do a bike ride that is a solution for me as I tend to go home to home. If I wear it it counts steps while I'm riding. Nothing to do with Strava. Just the Fitbit can't tell the difference between cycling and walking. Support have been useless. Even when I explained that it had done this when not using Strava they still told me to contact Strava.

[kellyllek]

Hi All, Sorry this is long winded but this is important to me so I hope you can help me out.

I got myself a Charge HR and really appreciate the info and motivation it's giving me. After years of cycling and Strava I've never monitored my heartrate but assumed it was much lower than estimated. I also have assumed that strava and other apps highly overestimate calories burned for example. 

I got the Charge HR because of the SmartTrack feature which came with the latest firmware update in Nov. I didn't bother with the Surge because I plan to get an upgraded Garmin for GPS and I currenlty use a Garmin 500 without HR. Meanwhile I"m surprised there has not been much discussion about SmartTrack and surpsied in thousands of reviews that I could only find one mention of it before I bought the Charge HR. 

So I'm intriged how the Charge HR SmartTrack does it; it really know when I'm out for a bike ride. I mostly MTB and today I was out for 5 hours about 4 of which were actual riding. Most of what I did was very technical and my speed average was only 8mph over those 4 hours. But technical MTB can be very challenging so there are a lot fo intense efforts, even though my HR never got over 150. Nonetheless I'm surprised at such a slow speed and doing the technical riding that the SmartTrack did realized I was on my bike the whole time.

The Charge HR synced to the the Fitbit App (ios) estimated I burned around 2000 calories over the whole 5 hours, which is far fewer than what normal non-hr estimates like Strava would give you, but I also think it is far more accurate. 

I was having a problem though between MyFitnessPal and Strava and Fitbit and some rides were being double recorded. For simplicity I disconnected everything from each other and am using using the FitBit app and Charge HR to read my calories and burn and not importing from elsewhere. 

Somehow though my strava is still linked and after uploading a ride Strava's date overwrites what the SmartTrack had recorded. ?Perhaps it's still reading through the Heath app or something?   I know this is happening because I always upload my Strava and it will overwrite the SmartTrack. 

So this is prettty cool in a way in that I can at least look at the Dashboard and see my HR data for the ride. But what's not cool is it also re-estimates my calorie burn compared to the SmarTrack and downgrades it significantly. SmartTrack read that I burned over 2000 over the 5 horus, and the Strava overwrite came in with about 1500 calories.  It's doubly confusing because strava alone would normally have estimated closer to 3000 calories. 

My immediate solution is to make sure I un-sync the Strava completely. I do like to see the data together, but I think the ChargeHR and SmartTrack alone is a far better indicator of what I'm doing than any outside overwrite.

I read somewhere if you track the exercise on your phone with the fitbit app and upload that to strava it'll include the HR info. I found though that the app is not nearly so accurate as the Strava app, or my Garmin, and the HR data was still not inlcuded. Also activating the exercise from the App has no option to read it as a bike ride!  I think there's only run options. I hear you can change it later or when you upload but really I think the SmartTrack just seems to be more accurate! At least SmartTrack know's I'm on the bike! 

If there was a way on strava to see my HR that'd be great, but I fear my only option is to get a new Garmin and chest HR monitor, and run the ChargeHR and Fitbit system separately for my metrics and diet info. 

Appreciate any thoughts! Tks.